Mario and Co. carve new inbetweenie territory--not quite an RPG and not a platformer--on the Wii.
Super Paper Mario is an RPG and a platformer, but it defines genre, really. Much has been said about the game and its mechanics, visuals, storyline, sound, and especially its gameplay. The defining characteristic of SPM is Mario’s ability to switch from a side-scrolling 2-D environment to the third dimension. Keep in mind this 3-D is not Mario 64’s 3-D. It is more like 2.5-D. When in 3-D mode in SPM, Mario is constrained to a very narrow 3-D plain, but this convention works to fine effect. A fully 3-D world, a la Super Mario 64, would be seriously challenging. SPM’s 2.5-D is plenty challenging as it stands. In terms of challenge, the game offers up a hefty 20+ hour experience for the main quest alone. Side quests in the form of collecting cards, tokens, and cooking add hours to the main quest. SPM consists of eight worlds dived into approximately four chapter each. Other reviews of SPM cite imbalance between the pacing of levels. I also found this to be true. Later chapters require considerable time to complete and come with increased difficulty in puzzle solving and enemy difficulty. This is all well and good, but strains the ratio of platformer to RPG mentioned earlier. That is, the beginning of the game feels most like a platformer and the end of the game saddles the experience with some heavy RPG elements. Visually SPM does not disappoint. Flipping back and forth between 2-D and 3-D never looses its appeal—the same cannot be said for the puzzle solving element of the dimensional shift. Overall there is a visual coherence to SPM that despite a few design choices works to immerse the gamer. The several worlds in SPM represent very different styles, some of them more consistent within the main style of the game than others. Some of the levels are a bit bland and rely too much on the 2-D sprite conceit. Enemy characters on a whole are also blander in design than in other Paper Mario entries. Overall, SPM could have benefited from taking design cues from its most vividly colored levels. Some levels could use some sprucing up.
Musically the game falls short of previous major Mario entries. This point has been made in almost every review I’ve read of the game. While there are some standout musical moments, the music in this game is minimalist and mostly forgettable. Was the musical minimalism a conscious design choice? I’m sure it was. Would the game have benefited from a more robust score? Definitely. Also, aside from a very few canned murmurs from Mario and pals—which are great and make for laughs—there are hardly any character noises to speak of, say nothing of pages and pages of dialog. Well written, clever, and witty, sure, but the pages of dialog will slow younger readers to the brink of frustration. Not to mention make some older users skip ahead of some of the dialog impatiently. Some of my favorite moments in the game ultimately failed to satisfy often because there were too few of them, like dialog from Bowser—“You believed your prophecy and we believed in mopping the floor with you” and “You never give up this easily when you attack my castle.” Other hysterical references exemplified the lucidity of the storyline like references to which button to push on the Wiimote, clever puns of where game heroes go when they die, and multiple examples of games ending. But like a Lays Potato chip one or several is never enough. Things I did not like so much included a reliance of repetition at certain moments of the game, like going back to the main town between worlds to find a place to stick the Pure Heart, and very little real incentive to complete some of the side quests. Super Paper Mario charms mostly with its humor that oozes pop cultural and self-referential tidings. Gameplay holds up well and offers something new. The Wiimote on its side works fine. Aside from the minor pain of having most of the actions embedded in menus which can slow the gameplay considerably (and truthfully makes the game as a whole feel much more like an RPG than I had expected), there really was no better way of mapping SPM’s controls to the Wiimote. Pointing actions with the Wiimote do not feel tacked on. And a few Wii-motion actions are seamlessly integrated into Mario and Co.’s attack repertoire. On its own Super Paper Mario is a fantastic addition to a nearly stalled supply of new games for the Wii early in its life cycle. It’s probably the second best game on the system to date. I’m not sure though that it satisfies completely. Mario platformer fans will tire of the games length and RPG difficulty. True RPG fans will scoff at the mere mention of RPG in any review of Super Paper Mario. Fans of Mario will like the adventure, but I don’t know if they will gush over it. In some ways Mario and his buddies have spread themselves thin across so many Nintendo properties that one can’t help but think that SPM contributes to that overwhelming feeling rather than enhances the Mario universe. There is a lot to love about Super Paper Mario, but in the end it doesn’t quite deliver like the platformers do, like New Super Mario Brothers and Mario 64 do. Super Paper Mario probably stands tallest and proudest as a worthy update to the Mario RPG series. If you are a huge fan of the Mario RPG games this is probably your 9.0-9.5 Editor’s Choice game. If you are a bigger fan of the Mario platformers SPM is more like an 8-8.5 game. Like Super Paper Mario I’m somewhere in between.